Kiwi climbing hero Athol Whimp

Athol Whimp and me in Venice, February 1999

Athol's great partner Andrew Lindblade emailed this picture to me this morning. Andy took it in February 1999, in Venice, California, when he and Ath had an LAX layover on their way back to Australia from France, where they'd been awarded the Piolet D'Or for their spectacular ascent of Thalay Sagar's North Face. I'd driven down from Santa Barbara to spend a couple afternoon hours with them. We ended up on the Venice Beach boardwalk, an anecdote that constitutes "The Alpine Tribe" Horizontal Interlude in Enduring Patagonia (pp. 168-171).

I'd met Athol in Patagonia after his February 1994 solo of Cerro Torre's Compressor Route. I'd bumped into him and Andy the following fall in Yosemite, and we shared a campsite for two or three hilarious weeks. Andy moved to the United States in the late 1990s, and I've seen him many times through the years. Athol and I kept in loose touch, but I hadn't seen him again until 18 months ago, when he and Andy drove down from Portland for a week of action in Yosemite. Quiet and a little withdrawn until you'd earned his respect, clever and hilarious once you had, and hard, disciplined, driven, keenly intelligent, and positively brimming with life, Athol was one of the people in the world I most admired. I think the partnership profile I wrote about him and Andy is the best piece of climbing writing I've ever done. And one of the easiest, because it's duck soup to channel such a great story. ("Right mate, Let's Get On With It," Climbing No. 231, June 2004).

Athol and Andy's son Aki in the Grampions this past January.

Athol was killed in a climbing accident in New Zealand a few weeks ago. It's hard to fathom; it hardly seems possible. The world is a lesser place without him in it.